Poetry from Terry Trowbridge

Posted on 11/01/2024 by Synchronized Chaos

Unemployed, Dating, Self-Esteem Issues

I wish I was naked with you,
but when I am naked with you
I wish I was invisible.

But you might find me by touch,
so I wish I were room temperature.
But you might find me by smell
so I wish I was sleeping in your bed for a week beforehand.
But you might find me by sound
so I wish to hold my breath for as long as it takes
for you to fall asleep waiting for me to come back
from wherever you think I vanished to.

But when I reappear, I would have no present
and you would think I had gone somewhere and returned empty-handed
and that empty-handed sheepishness
is why my self-esteem is so low.

That is why I am not answering your phone calls.

Disney women of the 1980s

The women of Disney’s Saturday morning cartoons were not princesses.

They lived serious lives and were empowered, but somehow we have forgotten them. We should remember three: Gadget Hackwrench, Rebecca Cunningham, Sunni Gummi.

Gadget Hackwrench was a S.T.E.M. gearhead who maintained an airship. She soldered spy equipment. She could drive, off-road, every vehicle that fit a mouse. She dressed in mechanic’s coveralls and was the only Rescue Ranger who wasn’t obsessed with their own image.

Rebecca Cunningham was a single parent who ran a shipping company. She owned a plane. She masterminded supply chain management, international trade regulations, and her daughter’s PTA. Her main employee was a man who starred in a movie without a single female protagonist and she was uncompromisingly his boss. And she did all of these things on screen.

Sunni Gummi infiltrated human castles and posed as a princess, boy crazy and a bit servile to a blonde rich girl until she learned some Hawthornian lessons about life. She became a talented squire, and devised plans on behalf of teenage girls that outwitted politicians, patricians, and her own favoured brothers. She was a savant flute player. She fought with monsters, bare-fisted.She fought with men, naively, but unflinchingly, a pawn played by an older human princess to deflect the violence of Machiavels.

But she represented more than a throwaway piece because no mere pawn could do these things in an urbane world and return home to a rustic family of druids and Gnostic secrets with dignity.

They are not prissy movie princesses. The role model women of Disney were everyday women of Saturday morning.

Let’s talk about working class breakfast cereal and break the chains of royal popcorn. Let’s ask where these women vanished to when we went to college.

Why did we stay silent about their absences when they were replaced in the 1990s by shows named after men like Squarepants, Doug, and other Nickelodeon disappointments?

Why did we let our fascination transfix us on the vapid Disney instead of the empowering one?

Two Magics

Your fairy godmother has a spell to give you an enchanted pizza topping in your suburban driveway. She throws sparkles over a semper vivum.

It stretches and inflates into an egg on a stem. Voila Bipitty bopitty artichoke. A prince steps out of his Range Rover with a Vessi in his handcasting chill.

Netflix looks around.

Terry Trowbridge has appeared in Synchronized Chaos before. He has some grant funding from the Ontario Arts Council and hopes that more poets can benefit from their programs in the next cycle (and Terry votes).

Poetry from Wazed Abdullah

Posted on 11/01/2024 by Synchronized Chaos

Young South Asian boy with short black hair and a light blue collared shirt. — Wazed Abdullah

A Shining Star

A shining star up in the sky,

A distant light that draws the eye.

Through darkest night, you brightly gleam,

A constant guide, a whispered dream.

You dance on high, so far, so free,

A spark of hope for all to see.

In silent skies, you always are,

Our faithful, glowing, shining star.

Wazed Abdullah is a student in grade nine at Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh.

Poetry from Jeff Tobin

Posted on 11/01/2024 by Synchronized Chaos

Of Sonnets and Skyscrapers

I wear this sonnet like a borrowed coat,

Stiff in the shoulders, seams pulled tight,

But stitched with threads from centuries ago,

Where ink met quill under a candle’s light.

I try to walk its lines, the measured pace,

Yet find the iambs don’t quite match my stride—

We’ve outgrown gallant rhymes and studied grace,

In favor of the blunt truths we can’t hide.

Now cities hum with digital confessions,

Algorithms dance in place of stars.

We measure worth in data and impressions,

Our loves reduced to avatars and bars.

Still, I patch this form, frayed though it may be—

Let it hold the sum of what we see.

Roots and Wings

I was born with roots buried deep,

tangled in the soil of a place

I never chose.

They said, grow where you’re planted,

but the earth felt like chains,

pulling me down

when all I wanted

was to fly.

You see, no one tells you

that wings come at a cost,

that to lift off

means leaving something behind—

a house,

a name,

a past.

I’ve felt both—

the pull of ground

and the ache of sky.

Each promises something the other can’t give,

each holds a piece of me

that the other can’t understand.

And now, I sit between them,

torn like a tree split by lightning—

my roots reaching down

while my heart looks up,

waiting for the courage to choose.

Maybe that’s the lie

we tell ourselves:

that you must pick one,

that you can’t grow

and fly,

that to be grounded

means losing the air,

and to soar

means forgetting the dirt.

But I think

we are both—

roots in the earth,

wings in the sky—

always tugged between where we come from

and where we long to go,

never quite free,

never quite still,

yet whole

in the longing.

Storms, Oaks, Roots

The sky cracked like a bell on the last night of autumn,

cold biting through the marrow, every bone humming.

We live like this—between breakage and bloom,

roots deepened by storms, reaching, always reaching,

downward into soil heavy with rain.

Oaks stand because they must,

holding what the earth gives—grit, flood, wind,

gathering strength from what tries to tear them apart.

We, too, are carved by what we survive,

the lines on our faces tracing the years of drought and plenty.

Pain sets its teeth in us, but still we grow,

hope rising stubborn as new shoots through cracked stone.

There’s no music to it, just the slow rise,

a kind of weathering in silence,

until we learn the language of roots,

how to drink deep from what remains.

Bruised but upright, we live as oaks live,

accepting the storms, holding tight in the wind,

and somehow, finding growth even in the breaking.

No Longer Here in Body, But …

You left in the middle of the night,

the house sighing in your absence, the door ajar,

as if you might return to fill the space again.

But silence consumed your place,

and we’ve learned to live with that weight,

growing larger by the day.

Your boots still by the hearth, worn thin with the miles,

carry the imprint of where you’ve been—

fields turned to dust, rivers that swelled and sank.

I trace the scuffed leather, hoping for something left behind,

a sign you’re still walking somewhere,

beneath a sky we both knew.

Absence doesn’t stay quiet,

it grows loud in the smallest things:

the kettle that doesn’t boil,

the coat never worn again,

the tools untouched, rust creeping in like autumn frost.

You are no longer here in body, but—

you remain in the turning of the soil,

in the way the wind presses through the trees,

in the stones you laid by hand,

one by one, until the walls stood solid.

We keep moving through the days,

because that’s what you’d want—

but the earth knows what’s missing,

and so do we,

every footfall a memory of where yours used to be.

Walking Your Field

I walked your field today, the one you tended

with hands thick from years of toil,

where earth clung to you as if it knew your name.

The furrows are softer now, untended,

but still they hold the shape of your labor,

your will pressed into the soil.

The air held a quiet weight,

a heaviness that comes from things left undone,

the half-mended fence,

the stones you set aside for later.

I stood where you used to stand,

looking out over what remains—

and what’s lost beneath it all.

I remember your boots sinking into the mud,

each step deliberate, as if every grain of dirt

mattered. And it did,

to you, everything mattered—the smallest seed,

the rainfall, the lengthening days.

Now the field feels like a question,

asking how long we can hold what we’ve lost,

how much we can grow without you here

to shape the rows, to tell the seasons when to start.

I plant my feet where yours once stood,

but the earth feels foreign, unfamiliar.

Still, I walk, because that’s all I know,

wanting something to rise from this,

like the crops you coaxed from the barren land,

year after year, with only your hands and hope.

Jeffery Allen Tobin is a political scientist and researcher based in South Florida. His extensive body of work primarily explores U.S. foreign policy, democracy, national security, and migration. He has been writing poetry and prose for more than 30 years.

Poetry from Komron Mirza

Posted on 11/01/2024 by Synchronized Chaos

Central Asian teen boy with short brown hair and a white collared shirt.

I say the end of time…

Although they are young, they are in their eighties

Old people have a poor wallet

Don’t get up in the morning prayer